Northern Lights
by KCerena
Summary: A brand new past and a new almost-sister mean big changes for Alice, changes that strain the central relationship of her existence. How will their never-aging love cope when a joyful brush with mortality leads to a dire one? Canon, basically.
1. Chapter 1

A/N: After reading _New Moon_, I wanted a better explanation for why Jasper doesn't help Alice figure out her past, and then disapproves so strongly of her going after Bella. Our narrator was a wee bit self centred, and could have been missing a lot of interesting drama behind the scenes!

Disclaimer: I don't own Twilight… I'm just a fanfic newbie whose day is brightened by each and every comment she receives :-p

This is my first FanFic of any kind. I had a wonderful time writing it over the holidays, and was recently inspired to go back and make it better.

I'm working on a new story now, and I'd love to hear y'all's input on what worked and didn't work this first time.

* * *

"Just go, Edward."

Pain shot through Bella's gasp into Edward's stone chest, echoing there as he tried to back away. The pain quickened like a dull surrogate heartbeat until it crumbled in the furnace of his anger. A trivial memory was tugging stray thoughts away from Bella's clear agony, and for once, Edward cursed his inhuman distractibility. Each fluttery tug at the edges of his mind seemed to scream that his soul was monstrously insensitive, that her simple, pure humanity would choke on his toxicity.

The persistence of the memory tugs told Edward that he was a monster, but their content perversely reminded him that he'd once been something else. A human child fighting with his dog over a piece of ginger cake. That child could have looked forward to anything…he'd been as pure and good as Bella, he'd deserved heaven in her arms, on Earth and thereafter, and yet he'd wanted nothing but that bit of stale dessert. His mother had returned to find him prostrate, inconsolable, his unrepentant dog consuming the reason for his existence. The cake's delicious smell had overpowered him with blind desire, and once he'd lost an inch to the beast it was all over. The smell of the cake was nutty, just a little fruity, its spiciness had burned his throat like crazy… _Christ, that's why the memory wouldn't let go!_

"Edward, you may as well find Jasper before he gets too far. I'm sure he's upset with himself, and I doubt he'll listen to anyone but you right now." Carlisle's voice interrupted the sparring of lover and killer, and it was the lover who let loose a savage hiss. Edward was certainly not interested in _talking_ with Jasper. Carlisle was too busy to notice Edward's bellicose expression, but his intentions tore a strangled sob from the only other mind within earshot.

"You might as well do something useful," Alice offered without looking at him. Though her voice was nonchalant, her mind called out with all the frantic immortal energy that Edward's flashback had stirred within his own thoughts. _Please Edward_…_I can't lose him. I don't think I can bear it if he runs away again. You understand about love now… will you try to forgive him? For me?_

Alice had nearly lost her other half, mere months before Edward had found his. Edward shivered as the images bubbled through their minds… _Jasper's blood-red stare… the lifeless rag of a girl … a body dumped like a marionette in the dust of a speeding car_. Neither Jasper nor Alice had come back after that hunting trip, and Edward had driven in circles, trying to find them for days. When he finally found her body, he knew he had yet to find her presence.

She'd been perched on a rock with her chin tucked between her knees, black eyes vacant and thoughts twisted firmly into her absent lover's future. The stare had persisted as he struck her again and again, and he'd only coaxed her back to the present by daubing her lips with fresh mountain lion blood. Her eyes had flickered in utter bewilderment, still unresponsive to sound or threats or pain, and then he'd kissed her moistened lips with a question in his wide eyes. He'd been asking, as if she shared his gift, what monstrous kind of bond could make her give up sunlight for the flickers of someone else's future. Did she forsake the now because there were no kisses, no caresses, no _gazes_ of a certain kind? Alice might have answered him on some level, because her mind had darted away from Jasper's future, lingering for a while on her first prophetic glimpse of him.

It had started as a prophecy of rain in Philadelphia. Alice had noticed him walking and decided he was interesting. It was enough to make new futures blossom riotously, kindling the passion that haunted her eyes as she'd slipped back into her trance. Her eyes would stay as cold as spent fire pits until Jasper's stare could revive them. Three weeks had been enough to make his eyes burn as black as hers, as if his passion had been enough to char the flame of human blood. The pair had knelt by the window seat for hours as Jasper cradled her thawing emotions, tenderly helping her re-inhabit each of the days she'd abandoned to be with him. It was not the intimacy of the moment that had made Edward blush colorlessly, but rather the sense that his brother and sister had never looked less human.

Edward still had trouble accepting the inhumanity of love, and he refused to look at Alice as he fled the burning kitchen. His agitation propelled him over the threshold in the same instant that he overtook his other siblings. Rosalie and Emmett stood a few yards from the river as if ready to spring at Jasper, who sat with his shoulders hunched against a tree trunk. One scarred hand covered his eyes, and the other clutched a now-warped metal object. His wordless thoughts flickered like storm clouds that only stilled when Edward spoke.

"It was only a matter of time. I've let this go on much too long."

Emmett and Rosalie stiffened, their minds indignantly racing through possibly implied threats. Jasper's mind only darkened with pain as he decided he couldn't defend himself, even for Alice's sake. No one anticipated Edward's next words, least of all Edward himself.

"Would you have come back to us if Alice were as fragile as the girl you killed last year?"

Neither Rosalie nor Emmett knew about the victim's uncanny resemblance to Alice. Jasper had torn her neck to shreds with one hand twisted in her spiky hair and the other hand twisted through both of hers, forcing the delicate wrist bones into contact with her jutting shoulder blades. It was the same posture in which he and Alice had made love the night before. She'd been in a teasing mood, tickling and tickling him, then darting out of his clutches like a water nymph. One second he'd been growling and clutching at the empty air, and the next she'd been squealing in ecstasy, arching luxuriantly against her pinions as Jasper sighed into the perfection of her throat. Those sighs now mingled with the human girl's screams in the perfect echo chamber of Jasper's memory, his horror blinding him to the embarrassing fact of Edward's presence.

"I… I don't know what I would have done."

Inwardly, Jasper doubted that anything could have convinced him to stay away from Alice longer than he had done already. His thoughts darted to the time, just before they'd met, when the desire to destroy himself had grown stronger every day. But then Alice alighted at his side, and the balm of her voice cleared his mind of borrowed horrors.

"The house smells safe now."

Her warm, solicitous tone filled the clearing with peace, but her thoughts bristled angrily at Edward's clear reluctance to forgive her love for his indiscretion. A few of the barbs reached the surface as she grabbed Jasper's hand, then shot Edward a hard look over her shoulder.

"I think Bella would like it if you drove her home."


	2. Chapter 2

_"If music be the food of love, play on;_

_Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,_

_The appetite may sicken, and so die._

_That strain again! It had a dying fall;_

_O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound,_

_That breathes upon a bank of violets,_

_Stealing and giving odor! Enough; no more:_

_'Tis not so sweet now as it was before." -- William Shakespeare, _Twelfth Night, _Act I Scene I_

_"I shall seize Fate by the throat; it shall certainly not bend and crush me completely."-- Ludwig van Beethoven, letter to F.G. Wegeler_

* * *

_Dit-dit-dit-DIT._

Even her knock was shrill and demanding. Beethoven's Fifth on fast-forward. But Edward's fingers never faltered on the piano keys, and his music ignored the rhythm of the knocks. He'd spent the last four hours improvising variations on Bella's lullaby, pouring his emotions into a reservoir of sound. Once they were floating away for everyone to hear, the feelings might stop eating at his soul. Edward knew the melody so well that the exercise demanded just a little of his attention, leaving the rest of his mind free to work out the shape of his predicament.

A few minutes ago, Edward's dissonant chord-pounding had resolved itself into a stoic passacaglia, turmoil giving way to despair. Then the infernal knocking had started. It didn't matter… Edward had thought through all of the relevant facts, and his decision was made.

"Go away", he spat through clenched teeth. His fingers continuing their funereal march, and didn't stop until the doorframe broke and the piano lid shut, milliseconds after his hands cleared the keys. Alice's eyes were blazing with vision and fury, and her small trembling hand was denting the piano lid. Edward's own hand crumbled the corner of the bench as he watched Bella shivering on the damp forest floor. But even as her stare threatened to burn Edward alive, he took comfort in the way the cold ground made Bella's body twitch, the way her moist lashes expelled grime from her eyes. However intense her pain might be for minutes or hours or days, Bella would remain a reactive human being. The world would chill her, dirty her, and eventually comfort her, and she'd have no way to escape these ministrations.

"It will be hard at first," Edward whispered through clenched teeth, avoiding the burn in his tormenter's eyes. "But time will heal her."

"How can you be such an idiot?" Alice's voice shook at a frequency that lent it the timbre of opera glass. "Really Edward, I used to think it was just lack of imagination, but how much imagination does it _take_ to believe that leaving Bella will hurt her the same way it hurts you?"

"She's human," Edward countered, his voice remaining as flat as his passacaglia. "When I'm gone, Bella will have no choice but to resume human existence. She won't have the option of blinding herself to her surroundings. Sooner or later, something will get through, and she will move on."

"I don't have to look at the future to know how wrong you are. But her future… I couldn't even show you the worst of it. She seems to get a bit better, but if I try to look ahead for more than a few months… everything goes blank. I've never felt anything like it. Ever since I noticed the blankness, I've been trying to find out if she-- if she d--"

"Don't be stupid!" Edward interrupted with a snarl. "It is perverse and self-indulgent to look for death threats set in motion by the _departure_ of monsters from her life." Getting up to pace, Edward lowered his voice to an almost-threatening whisper. "Don't go looking for her future at all. We've done enough damage." Without giving Alice a chance to respond, Edward turned on his heel and entered Carlisle's study.

Alice stood motionlessly for a few minutes, focusing as hard as she could on the edges of the void in Bella's future. Their unfamiliar raggedness soon panicked her enough that she rushed from the room to join Edward.

"If this were not the only way, I could never bear it. Nothing she can tell me will change what must be done. She does not see reason when it comes to her own protection, and I must leave her before my selfish desires drive reason from my thoughts as well." Edward sank morosely into his father's chair as Carlisle gazed out his large study window, letting the early morning glow flood his amber eyes.

"On the contrary," he murmured. "I saw Bella face death, last night and last spring, and for her in that moment there is nothing _but_ reason. She is afraid because she loves her life, she loves her parents, and she loves you. I cannot express how extraordinary it is that her fear has a purpose in the face of death. When death comes that close, fear as the only purpose most humans can comprehend." Carlisle closed his eyes, and spoke again more warmly. "The only moments when I've known that kind of fear were the moments when I forced this life upon you and your mother and siblings, without the knowledge or consent or blessing of anything but my own selfish compulsion not to endure this existence alone. I don't think I ever completely forgave my own weakness until I saw a human girl choose to love and embrace my son, my family, and my way of life."

Carlisle's still-closed eyes were blind to the emotions that were rising in his son's face, and they flew open in astonishment when Edward's chair toppled. "She _will_ _not_ choose this _existence_. I forbid it. Stay if you like… I… I need to tell Esme goodbye." Carlisle sank onto the edge of the desk as if Edward had struck him, and Alice was so unnerved by the sight of her father's vulnerability that she left the room as swiftly as her brother had done.

An hour later, Alice peered through barriers of lace, crepe, and her own clasped knees to confront the only man who ever dared to invade her closet.

"Get out of here," she protested, and was uncharacteristically surprised by the hurt look on Jasper's face. "I mean, the feelings in this house must be driving you crazy. Go on… I don't think I'm going to school today."

He winced at her swift mood change. "Alice, none of us are going to school today. We're…packing and going to Denali." He reached out to brush the skin of her wrist with one reverent finger, and froze when a thousand thread loops ensnared his wristwatch. Decades of living with Alice had taught him to treat snagged lace like a live grenade, and he freed himself warily before peering in confusion at the offending garment. "What is this, Alice?"

"It was supposed to be for Bella." Alice spread the wedding dress across her knees, somehow looking more pitiable than she ever looked when affecting sorrow to get her way. She closed her eyes, relaxed her tiny body into Jasper's embrace, and buried her head in his scarred neck. Jasper folded the dress carefully, then brushed his sinewy hands over her birdlike neck and shoulder bones. She twitchily registered the confusion he projected, and he reluctantly explained.

"I don't understand.… I asked you if you wanted to get married when we found the Cullens fifty years ago."

"And?" Alice twisted gently to look him in the eyes.

"And… you said the ritual didn't fit."

Alice nodded, curling up against his chest again.

"When I found you, I had no idea what marriage was. What love was, even. After we learned that Carlisle felt the same way about Esme that we felt about each other, that Rosalie and Emmett and billions of human couples knew love too, it was magical to feel like a part of something so old." Dreamily, Alice kissed a luminous scar that had always been her favorite. "I know Rosalie and Emmett love each other, but seeing them get married felt so… false. You told me that Rosalie wasn't perfectly happy, just agitated. She always wanted a beautiful wedding, so she's had lots of them, and in a way it makes sense, because her love for Emmett is what gave him his new life, his new family. But she always hoped her husband would give her babies when he married her, and Emmett can't, and she wants more and more weddings because none of them can do what her first wedding was supposed to do."

Jasper considered this, then countered, "But Edward and Bella couldn't have babies either. Not if she became one of us."

"It's different for Bella. She doesn't dream about babies. Edward's all she wants. Except… he could also give her brothers, sisters, the big family she's never had, and a new world she thinks is wonderful. And at the same time… he'd be giving her to me. To all of us. Completing us. You and me… our completeness doesn't have anything to do with this family, or any family, but theirs could. Jazz… what he's doing is so, so wrong."

Alice trembled with silent sobs, and Jasper knew she was asking him to condemn their brother as she did. And in a way, Jasper did mourn the loss of his strange human almost-sister. The expectant, worshipful way she looked at Edward, the rest of the family, and the very house they lived in sent shivers up his spine… they reminded him of the look that Alice had worn when she'd found him. And that same look crossed Alice's face when she looked at Bella, dreaming of a new sister who could show her what it meant to have real birthdays, real high school friends, and one day a real wedding. Alice still melted his heart with looks of smoldering glee, of knowing adoration, but there was no escaping the way that her bond with him repressed the rush to collide with unknown territory that was the first thing Jasper had loved about her.

Jasper sat rigidly at attention as he imagined Alice falling exuberantly in love with a human boy, giving him the gift of an immortal family, and marrying him in good faith. One delicate hand was now stroking his brow, trying to smooth away the worry that poured from his mind. He was glad the general malaise in the house gave him a good excuse for his emotions, which plummeted further when he felt a stab of envy for his unhappy brother's selflessness.


	3. Chapter 3

Esme frowned as she brushed one finger against the oxide-encrusted glass. She'd bought the immense mirror against her better judgment, and now prepared to deal with the consequences. The tough patina shattered like eggshell when her ammonia-soaked rag made contact, and Esme mustered half a smile at the rarely-considered thought that few power sanders could exert as much force as her slim, bare hands.

Esme quickly unearthed a picture of the sitting room, and the discovery made her face light up. Even through the anguish of Edward's absence, she realized that the scene framed therein looked almost normal. Rosalie had just tried to smack Emmett with the travel book she'd been skimming, and Emmett, bless his heart, had reached out to save the book from shattering against his skull. Rose giggled lovingly as he pressed her down into the sofa, a big hand snaked all the way around each forearm, and soon they'd forgotten everything but those excessively juicy kisses that had gotten them kicked out of the house in 1936.

The commotion made Jasper look up from his course catalogue, but did nothing to divert Alice from the game she liked to play before it snowed. With her fingers cradling Jasper's tousled head and her own face staring blankly upward, Alice was tricking the supernatural into believing she intended to drag her bedsheets onto the roof and make various sweeping gestures, replaying the same future moment over and over while perturbing the wind differently each time. Alice's lips twitched gleefully whenever her curious instrument seeded a dust speck with the germ of an unusually lovely snowflake, but now she only blinked in confusion, her concentration lapsing as Jasper shifted his head in an effort to give Rosalie and Emmett the privacy they never seemed to want.

"Sorry beautiful, " he said sheepishly, laying his catalogue aside and reaching up to trace the left edge of Alice's delicate nose. "Did I make you lose a good one?"

Alice pursed her lips as she clasped the hand he lifted from her face, kissing a fingertip before settling back to look at the ceiling and use both of her thumbs to trace the outline of one broad, cropped fingernail. "It's hard to tell if they'll be any good before I see them. The game wouldn't be any fun if I knew how to do it properly." She briefly considered a lock of Jasper's hair as if wondering at the origins of the most miraculous snowflake of all, but the pathos evaporated from her mood as her eyes strayed to the course catalog he'd laid open on the arm of the couch. "_Philosophy_?" Alice raised an eyebrow and twisted her face into an unladylike grimmace.

"What's wrong with philosophy?"

"Reading Kierkegaard is like listening to Edward mope for hours and hours and hours. And not being allowed to tune it out because it's homework." Alice winced theatrically as she eyed the open page more carefully. "Though a whole semester of "Existential Ethics" _might_ make me forget why I miss having him around."

Now it was Jasper's turn to wield his reading material as a weapon, possibly hoping that Alice would react to the move the way Emmett had. But her hand stopped the catalog without touching his own, and Alice turned up her nose as she listlessly began leafing through the booklet. Her gaze lingered at seminars on Le Corbusier and "The Late Renaissance Aesthetic," but not even a glance at "Fault Lines in French Fashion" seemed to modulate the boredom and anxiety that were pooling in her mind. The boredom spiked and receded as Alice finally put the catalog aside, but the anxiety continued to mount as she took Jasper's face between her now-empty palms. "Honestly… I'm not sure I feel like being in school right now. Maybe I'll get a library job or something."

Alice was the only Cullen who preferred high school to college, less because of her distaste for philosophy than because of her peculiar fondness for teenagers. Jasper found their predictable, ill-concealed emotions nearly as uninteresting as their high school classes, but Alice liked nothing better than to watch their impetuous decisions collide like billiard balls and leave behind jagged landscapes of adolescent drama. Like snowflakes, these landscapes were as distinct as the forces that shaped them were constant, and their contours responded to the sluggish tides of human custom in endless new ways. Every pockmarked school ceiling supported an invisible web of social cause and effect that resembled nothing the sparsely-populated vampire world could ever hope to furnish, leaving Alice entranced by the decades of adolescent behavior that the rest of them remembered with crystal-clear indifference. In this way, Alice's sensitivity to causal forces had moved her to cultivate a relationship with the past that was as rich and responsive as her strange communion with the future. Human gestures not only disturbed the threadlike mass of might-have-beens that seethed beneath her consciousness, but often forced a progression of related gestures to well up from Alice's eighty-odd years of perfectly remembered life at the outskirts of human society.

Carlisle often wished aloud that his daughter's talents could stir up the human gestures that languished in his impossibly deep memory like sediment at the bottom of anoxic lake. But when he started comparing sociology faculties and suggesting ways for Alice to channel her talent into a career like his own, Alice would flit upstairs to curl up in her bathroom and apply a garish new color to her stone toenails. Anyone who disturbed her would get an earful of aggressively girlish prattle, and it would be days before she relaxed her homage to the ordinary modern teenager and returned her ear to the winds of social causality. But even when she stopped shying away from the insights her unique gift made possible, Alice never lapsed into the dialect of scholarly condescension that would need to package her thoughts for consumption at Dartmouth. Her mind could jump between narrative perspectives with the same catlike grace that her body commanded, but she never tired of regarding her classmates with the reverence of a geeky younger sibling. Rather than affect the amused tolerance of an academic, Alice seemed blissfully content to whisper insight after insight into the void of her lover's ear, withholding rare pearls of knowledge from the oblivious outside world and squandering it upon Jasper alone, just as she did with the rest of her perfections.

Rather, this outlet _had_ contented her until real high school friends had suddenly brought Alice closer to humanity than she'd once dreamed possible. Alice had lately lost interest in causality games and thrown herself into the here and now, forgetting her erstwhile preference for 1970s sitcoms and immersing herself in the shallow pool of her classmates' popular culture. In the weeks before the birthday party, she'd consulted increasingly silly gossip magazines for conversibles that might surface at her new lunch table, ignoring the fact that Bella and Angela read nothing but familiar old novels.

Jasper's heart had burned with pain and jealousy as he'd watched his beloved neglect her old pastime, and he'd guiltily found that he was pleased by Bella's lukewarm responses to certain over-the-top slumber party ideas. He had often tried to tell Alice that neither she or Bella really belonged in the cultural shallows of the present, and the two newest Cullens had fought briefly but intensely over Jasper's opposition to the elaborate birthday plans that would frame his fateful slip-up. Jasper felt guiltier than ever now that Alice shied away from all reminders of teenage culture, acting as if she couldn't bear her new exclusion from the only human society where she'd very nearly belonged. Her vague sadness was as inscrutable as her lovely, pensive face, and Jasper longed to take her hand and ask whether the life of a Dartmouth student felt too close to everything she'd left behind in Forks, or too far. But he couldn't find the right words to probe her delicate emotions without breaking them, and he felt like the worst kind of coward as he grasped at the safe subject of libraries.

"Won't you get bored after about ten seconds of book-stamping?"

Alice reacted as if his cowardice neither surprised nor perturbed her, simply shrugging and going back to fingering his hair. He let her continue in silence until she returned her hands to the sides of his face and gently lifted his head from her lap. Her lingering caress made his skin tingle as she got up from the couch and glided across the room, kneeling before Esme's now-glistening mirror. Alice usually ignored mirrors when she wasn't wearing new clothes, taking no more or less interest in her face than in any pretty trinket her money could buy. Now, she seemed to be scrutinizing her perfect features for something non-aesthetic, and they grew all the more striking as her brow and mouth contorted almost ferociously. The face in the mirror did not react when Jasper's scarred, impassive features appeared in the background, but only refocused its eyes to regard the two figures in the mirror as if they were possibly hostile strangers. Four golden eyes attacked each side of the glass like tawny lasers, their unearthly glare dissolving a patina that Esme's chemical assault had left untouched. When the patina fell away and freed two pairs of perfect immortal lips, Alice's parted to let loose a single sentence of breathy, childlike soprano.

"I want to go to Biloxi and find out who I was."


	4. Chapter 4

"Is there anythin' more I can get for you, Ma'am?"

A middle aged file clerk with a white-blonde mustache poked his head into the reading room of the Jackson State Hospital, indenting to wink at the girl who'd just made his week by spending the better part of her Saturday planning for a history paper about turn-of-the-century psychiatric treatment. His prominent left eye seemed to swallow the wink whole as he spluttered and turned a deep plummy red, his mind automatically gauging the windspeed of the hurricane that had spread the contents of his file cabinets over the rough-hewn pine table so that thick manila envelopes sprawled every which-way on the dirty linoleum floor. Exasperation cooled into despair as the clerk shook his head and looked disapprovingly at the source of the hurricane, his eyes brimming with all the annoyance that his straitjacket of chivalry would let him release in the direction of a lady.

"I'm sorry to intrude, but we're closin' in ten minutes, and It'll take me a good long while to put these records back in order."

Instead of shrinking from the panicked near-hostility in his voice, the girl beamed angelically at her instantly-befuddled visitor and spoke to him in a voice whose sonority almost blinded him to the impossibility of her claim.

"Sorry about the mess. It looks a lot worse than it is. Come back in five minutes, and I'll have everything back how it was when I got here."

The clerk closed the door and collapsed into his desk chair, his brain overloading with confusion and desire. Three and a half minutes later, a few stray gentleman's reflexes yanked his chin up and down in the direction of a meteoric arc that only his subconscious could resolve into a pixie's dance from the now-spotless library to the hospital lobby doors. Alice picked up speed as a few more bounds brought her to the edge of the surrounding forest; as she ran, she sniffed greedily at the strange, cloying air that had been the first thing to fill her infant lungs. The air captured bits of the dirt kicked up by her toes and tiny splinters of the branches that hit her across the face, releasing smells that dissolved in a million tiny water droplets and flooded her immortal palate with a haze of aromatic decay. This olfactory roar blinded Alice to the scents of animals that had not even scampered out of sight, and she began to imagine what it would feel like to be a fetus drowning in the essence of a mother who was both all-encompassing and infinitely mysterious.

The strangeness of the air made it almost easier for Alice to imagine being a half-sentient blob of flesh than to picture the lives framed in turn-of-the-century asylum records. She'd spent all day scanning patient data sheets for signs of her brief mortal life, but had felt neither surprised nor disappointed when the search unearthed no sign of a tiny girl clairvoyant. Despite James's smug testimony and her own concordant premonitions, it seemed starkly impossible that lively Alice Cullen had spent her formative years having her brain battered by doctors who wanted to deprive her of the one sense they couldn't muffle by shutting her up in a windowless cell. With a sigh, Alice gave up trying to distract herself with safe imaginings, and let herself remember what it had felt like when Jasper's absence had made her lose interest in her human senses. It was painful enough to imagine surrendering her own sights and scents and touches for a shifting mass of futures that were pulled every which way by a melange of non-beloved minds, and it would be unimaginably horrid to have this kaleidoscope of futures pulled apart from the inside by malicious electric shocks.

Even as the horror of this image made Alice forget to control her flight path, plowing through a few trees that streamed out behind her in a comet tail of wet sawdust, a part of her hoped that Jasper's research had succeeded where hers had failed. Horrible as it would be to visit a place where slow spirals of pain had consumed the last years of her life, it was even more horrible to imagine her life being sucked away by an undefined, abstractly painful adversary. Pure, abstract pain could beget only storybook monsters, monsters that would fade into nothing if they pushed away their killer instincts and played at being human. Alice hadn't tasted human blood since before she'd met Jasper, but she craved it as desperately as ever and channeled every craving into passion for a man who craved blood the way he craved her. As much as Alice loved the ecstasy of incompleteness that bound her and Jasper together, she was beginning to worry that the scarred, monstrous part of Jasper was what looked worshipfully into her eyes, recognizing a kindred monster that was the only thing left of a much-abused girl.

A familiar silhouette brushed at the edge of Alice's vision, and a fresh wave of incompleteness knocked her breathless. Too far away for his scent to reach Alice's confused nose, Jasper seemed as insubstantial as the trees that her stone body had shattered like matchsticks. This insubstantiality seemed to bring out the catlike set of his body, and strangely made him seem more menacing than ever. Jasper looked like an athlete frozen at the split second before a race, when every muscle surges with the unspent power of a thousand training runs, and Alice felt her head hit the ground before her distracted senses could report that live wires had exploded. Jasper's muscles now vibrated with a new kind of electricity, and it entered Alice's body through the stony limbs that held her motionless. A growl escaped her throat as Jasper's knee pressed the hem of her skirt up almost to her panties, but the growl ended on a note of frustration as he shifted Alice into his arms for a butterfly kiss. Hoping to shock the animal Jasper back out of hiding, Alice slid her hand into his front trouser pocket and froze as her hand brushed a thin sheaf of papers. Jasper's embrace tightened as she unfolded the photocopied patient records and considered what was left of her barren human life.

A new tension washed away the urgency of sex and danger, as if the two of them were keeping silent _in memoriam_, and Alice raised her sad eyes to Jasper's tortured ones. She held his gaze for a second, then pressed her face into his scarred neck and clung to him like a frightened child.

"Thank you for being with me," she choked out in a whisper that was just sentimental enough to embarrass them both. With the pressure of her hands and lips, Alice tried to thank him more specifically for the half-century of bliss that had so completely overcome her sad beginnings. She sensed the layer of unease that still pulsed beneath his skin, and she tried to thank him especially for coming to Biloxi and braving the long winter daylight that was making him relive his own formative nightmares, all so she wouldn't face her own nightmare alone. Cradling his head as tenderly as he held her body, she laid her cheek against his and tried to draw the unease from his soul.

"Show me what it was like for you," she whispered in a voice that was calm, almost commanding. Jasper knew that she wanted him to let her feel the waves of suffering that were welling up in his memory, but he couldn't bear to assault Alice with a new source of pain or to expose the savage killer who had originally felt that pain. Sensing his reluctance, Alice pulled away from him and headed for the car he'd parked at the edge of the forest.

"I'll drive you to the airport tonight. Now that you've found a lead, I can finish the research on my own."

Jasper stayed where he was, focusing on something in the distance that did not quite remind him of Texas. "I want you to come back to New Hampshire too. Now that you know what happened… being here will hurt you the way it hurts me."

Alice unlocked the car and slid into the driver's seat, then spoke in a low, dead voice that the strange air easily carried to her faraway lover. "You're wrong. I don't know this place at all. It's hard for me to see what's going to happen here because the people are so alien… I haven't spent any time looking at what happens when they decide things, and it's almost like they're a species I don't understand. Mary Alice was one of _them_, not one of us, and I have to stay here and watch these people until I know them well enough to feel something when I read about what happened to her."

Alice turned away from Jasper after that, as if afraid that real contact with the loved and the familiar would break her concentration on her baffling fatherland. Jasper could do nothing but return to New Hampshire and read Kierkegaard while he nervously awaited Alice's short, sparse phone calls. Her manner was unfailingly tender, but her treatment of the research effort was excessively factual, as if she were determined to hide her feelings about the past as completely as Jasper hid his.

Jasper sometimes felt guilty for the way his black mood affected his already despondent parents, but the guilt turned to anger whenever his pacing brought him face to face with the cross at the top of the stairs. It took all of Jasper's self-control to keep from reducing the object to splinters when he thought of where it came from, of the fact that Carlisle's father would have burned Alice at the stake if he'd had the chance. Hot anger mingled with shame as his thoughts drifted to the object that he'd hidden in his own sock drawer; Jasper hated Carlisle for embracing his murderous heritage so publicly and shamelessly, and he hated his own reluctance to discard the last object linking him to his former life of carnage.


	5. Chapter 5

Rosalie and Emmett came home before Alice did, flooding the house with their honeymooners' glow as well as piles upon piles of expensive gifts. Their return brought a little light back into Esme's eyes, and Jasper saw her smile for the first time in weeks. But not even Emmett's robust cheer could stand up to the gloom for long, and everyone was desperately looking forward to spring break in Denali. Every time Esme left the house, Jasper and Emmett eyed each other like trysting lovers and headed for the woods through separate doors. Their wrestling matches were idly but intensely violent, and crackled with the electricity of despair.

The only thing besides wrestling that kept Jasper going was the thought that Alice would join them in Denali. Alice was investigating a few new leads and had only promised to come midweek, but she was fond enough of Irina, Kate and Tanya to make him reasonably sure she'd get there eventually. A fresh pang overtook him when he thought about how long she'd avoided New Hampshire, and his head began swimming with plans for renewing their union. Jasper comforted himself by remembering how easily he could read Alice's body language, how they hardly needed words when they were alone together, and he desperately hoped he'd be able to make things right.

Jasper was so eager to get out of the gloomy house that he forgot how much he detested long flights. The humans who eyed his first class seat had no idea that the burn of their scents in his throat was about a million times more uncomfortable than having one's elbows jostled by the fat guy in the middle seat. Emmett blocked Jasper's access to the aisle, looking as ready for action as always, and even Esme looked ravenous by the time they touched down in Anchorage. They drove to the Denali border, then ran through the breathtaking wilderness until they reached their improbably grand destination. Tanya danced out to meet them, her pale eyes and hair painted orange by the disappearing sun.

The two clans melted fluidly together, distributing themselves around the edges of a room whose rough pine walls were decorated with animal heads. Eleazar was probably the only person in history who'd ever used taxidermy to celebrate vegetarianism.

Rosalie turned up her pretty nose at Tanya, Kate, and Irina, then took Emmett's arm and primly steered him toward Carmen and Eleazar. Not usually one to feel intimidated, Rosalie made an exception for women whose beauty had been immortalized more completely than her own. The ravishing Denali sisters sent tingles of fear and arousal up the spines of the men who lived and told their stories, and it was hard for Rosalie to forget the fact that they'd seduced more men than she had ever seen. Rosalie had never wanted anything more than to be a virgin teenage bride, and her fading human upbringing had taught her that good girls should have nothing to do with scarlet women, especially ones who made a good girl feel so inadequate. Luckily for Carlisle, the Denali sisters were too amused by Rosalie to punish anyone for her rudeness, and the families had visited amicably for decades. At the moment, they looked crestfallen as they scanned the room their favorite Cullen. Alice liked to sit at their feet like an immortal little sister, giggling delightedly at the year's best seduction stories and letting her cousins do her hair up in pin curls.

With a collective sigh, the sisters sat down with Carlisle. They inquired solicitously about Edward until Carlisle excused himself to go hunting with Esme, whereupon they turned to the subject of Alice and her research. It hurt Jasper to treat Alice's bruising past as a curiosity to be stripped for smalltalk, and he was thinking about running after Carlisle and Esme when a knock at the door made the room go silent. Tanya excused herself, surmising aloud that Jasper's parents had forgotten something. Her eyes filled with the ghostly gleam of dawn that was just starting to radiate from the front picture window, then burned with sparking delight as she squealed and flung the door wide open.

Alice looked small and vulnerable as she stood on the front stoop in gray wool traveling clothes, arms hugging her body as if the chic, impractical ensemble were letting too much cold air in. An enormous suitcase dangled carelessly from her brittle-looking fingers. She beamed up at Tanya warmly enough, but the radiance of the smile seemed to disperse into the cold air before it could reach her black eyes. Tanya disappeared upstairs with Alice's coat and suitcase, and then Jasper had his arms full of delicate bird bones and he was kissing his beloved as if he were uncharacteristically blind to their audience. She responded passionately, blissfully, then turned her head and laid her cheek against her lover's scarred neck. There was no ignoring the audience now, and Jasper's arms were quickly unburdened as Kate took Alice by the hand and skipped over to join her sisters by the fireplace.

Jasper tried listening to Rose and Emmett tell Carmen and Eleazar a series of Europe stories that had been wasted on the gloom of the New Hampshire mansion, but his eyes kept flickering to the women who blushed invisibly in the firelight. Alice was playing her usual part, gleefully clapping her hands as Irina teased silver pins into her hair, but her body never moved from its fetal crouch, arms and legs insulating its core from the giggles that bubbled at the surface of her voice. When Jasper forced his attention back to the Europe stories, he noticed that Carmen was looking sternly at Tanya, gesturing with her eyes at Alice and then at Jasper. It took a while for Tanya to drag her attention from a story about Kate and a narwhal poacher, but she eventually shot Carmen a chagrinned look and slid her arms around her sisters' waists.

They disappeared in a flourish of silk and bangles, winking at Alice and nodding meaningfully at the stairs. Carmen squeezed Jasper's shoulder, then expelled him from the couch with a hard little push, and he rose to find Alice standing shyly at his side. She held out her hand and led him solemnly upstairs, pausing at the threshold of the north guest room. Before she could work the doorknob and lead him inside, Jasper tenderly gathered her up in his arms, carried her across the threshold, and curled up on the bed. Her hands moved to his shirt buttons with an almost mechanical confidence, but even as Jasper thrilled at her touch, he stopped her hands and clasped them urgently in his.

"Alice, tell me what's wrong."

Jasper's whispered from the hoarsest edge of the vampire register, his eyes boring into Alice's tired-looking face. Alice curled up against his chest, turning her cheek against him as she'd done an hour before.

"Yesterday I found something I'd been looking for, and it was… hard. I'm not ready to talk about it yet, but I… needed to be here with you."

Tiny hands returned to Jasper's shirt buttons, their dull urgency unchanged. He didn't resist this time, and gently slipped his own hands under Alice's knit dress. Her back arched as he curled his long fingers around each of her childlike thighs, and her breathing quickened as his hands moved slowly upward. Jasper let go just long enough to shrug off his shirt, but when his hands found Alice's hip bones, lifting them in an attempt to pull the dress over her head, he found her body slack and suddenly unresponsive. Black panic pooled in her eyes as they stared up at something no one else could see. A few seconds later, she blinked dazedly and sprang from the bed, straightening her clothes and reaching for a small purse that lay atop her suitcase.

Once again, her willowy hand met the resistance of Jasper's sinewy one, and his glare proclaimed silently that he _would_ get some answers this time. Alice met his gaze coolly, and answered with a perfunctory dryness that matched her phone descriptions of library research.

"I just saw Bella jump off a cliff and drown herself. If you'll hand me my purse, I'd like to call Forks and warn Charlie."

The silver phone was ringing at her ear before either of them knew how it had gotten there. After a few agonized seconds, she hung up on the answering machine with a metallic crash and an agonized cry. She shrugged on her hat and coat too quickly for Jasper to react, then hissed with rage when she found him blocking the doorway.

"Alice, Edward forbade us to touch her life again. If you go now, and he finds out, it'll tear apart everything that's left of this family."

Alice's dry eyes glinted with fury, the clutch purse trembling in her hands.

"If this family falls apart now, it's because _you_ almost killed Bella last year. Not because _I_ wouldn't let her finish the job. Do you really think Edward would come back to us if she _dies_?"

Her words left a new hollowness in Jasper's chest, and his voice became hoarse again as he stared at the far bedroom wall. "That's precisely why you mustn't go to her. Bella lives in a world that has nothing to do with us. We _belong_ in different worlds. Contact with our family was hurting her, and hurting us too, and none of us will ever heal if you open up that contact point again. Edward wanted us to stay away from her, and as long as we maintain that separation, nothing that happens to Bella can hurt him or the rest of the family."

From the corner of his eye, Jasper saw Alice's eyes widen in shock. He instantly regretted his harsh words, but his mind was still gripped by the irrational sense that returning to Forks now would be very dangerous for her.

When she spoke again, her words seemed to chill the frozen landscape that stretched off into the distance.

"So you'd like to pretend she's dead already. For the good of the family. Just like the Brandons did to Mary Alice. I found a gravestone yesterday, with the right birthdate this time. The date of death is when they sent her away."

Alice left the house without another word. Jasper sat by the window in shock, regretting what he'd said with every cogent bit of his mind. He sat without moving as the Alaskan dawn gave way to twilight once again, and it was almost midnight by the time a light knock made his hair stand on end. Kate poked her head through the half-open door and frowned as she took in the still-made bed.

"What happened? Where's Alice?"

Chagrin brought a little order back to Jasper's scattered senses as he realized that Alice had left the house undetected. He somehow managed to tell Kate what Alice had seen and done, and let her lead him downstairs. Everyone reacted badly to the news, and Emmett spent the next hour trying to soothe Rosalie so overzealously that she snarled and left the house herself.

Rosalie had always mocked her brothers for the amount of running they needed to do to relieve their excess angst, but now her own fury propelled her across the tundra so fast that she felt her golden hair tug at her course like a rudder. She was furious at Edward and Bella for making the whole family suffer, and incredulous that the Cullens were still paying for such shallow doomed passion. In retrospect, it was comically natural that Edward would mistake bloodlust for love, seeing that he couldn't feel the way men were supposed to feel when they looked at pretty women like Rosalie and Tanya, but it was still beyond ridiculous for him to tear his family apart for the sake of this sad little charade.

Rosalie had thought these things every day for the past six months, and she was fifty miles away from the house before she hit upon the source of her fresh anger. Bella had just outdone Edward at his own perverse love game, and yet Edward was the only Cullen not suffering for her stupidity! Rosalie spun around as fast as her hair would let her and headed back in the direction of the house, which the Denali clan had equipped with a personal cell transmitter. Rosalie picked up speed, and made plans for helping her brother feel the pain he so deserved.


	6. Chapter 6

Wow, I did it… the last chapter!! I hope you've had as much fun reading as I've had writing, and I'd really really love to hear what you think. Please let me know if you liked it, or if you noticed any crippling flaws… any and all reviews really make my day, and they'll help me figure out how to make my next story better!

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After Alice left, the aurora started pulsing across the sky. The blue-green northern lights scattered in all directions upon contact with vampire skin, making the Cullens and their hosts look as nervously ill as they felt. Jasper looked especially alien as he sat by the front window, pale face and hair glowing like he was trapped underwater.

They were all helpless enough that they might as _well_ have been underwater, and Emmett was dying to channel his frustration into a few sporting dismemberment attempts. But when Emmett tried to catch Jasper's eye, his brother's glassy, green-tinted eyes responded no more obviously than the windowpane did. Jasper no longer needed wrestling to take his mind off the ache of drifting apart from Alice, not after his parting words had exposed the monstrous essence of his soul. He'd hidden his essence from his beloved for more than 50 years, and so he was haunted by the knowledge that she'd leave him if she ever saw him clearly. Unfortunately he was haunted just as persistently by the fact of his own dishonesty.

Now that the burden of dishonesty had been lifted from his conscience, it was almost bearable to think of Alice separating her life from his. She had been like the moon, squandering her incomparable light on one fetid lover's existence; now she could be the aurora, arcing joyously through the sky and scattering light everywhere she cared to go. Jasper concentrated on this vision as hard as he could, but not even the visual of the aurora could keep his thoughts away from the nightmare of Alice being torn, burned, extinguished. Extinguished because Jasper had torn the family apart.

Jasper's insides constricted as a flame of light brown hair licked the edges of his vision, and his thoughts flickered instantly to Jane. But Jane was in Italy, about to threaten Alice with torment and death, and it was only Esme and Carlisle coming to join the ranks of the uselessly tormented.

Jasper's cell phone buzzed inside his pocket, but he felt strangely unmoved to answer it until Irina looked at him as if expecting him to squash some annoying insect. Freeing the phone and opening it seemed to take an enormous amount of effort, but everything changed when he saw the caller I.D. It was impossible that Alice still wanted to talk to him, and it remained impossible throughout a terse exchange about the details of the insane rescue plan. Even though Jasper's heart wouldn't register that he was really talking to Alice, it had no trouble reacting fearfully to the details she shared with him, and he wished desperately that his words could save her life as easily as they had taken her away from him. Happily enough, the only thing he wanted to ask her was the only thing he could rightfully expect.

"I want you to promise you'll get out of there before they kill you too."

"Yes, I promise. And I love you."

She said the words no more or less passionately than she usually said them, then hung up without waiting for a response. Irina wanted to know the details, and Jasper sent her after Emmett and Rosalie with the reason for Alice's demand that they abort their repentant sojourn. The numb lethargy was gone from Jasper's limbs now, though his head spun with fear and fresh confusion as he climbed the stairs to the room where Carlisle and Esme were staying. Carlisle was alone, and a note of apprehension touched his face as he awkwardly ushered Jasper inside. He had sensed Jasper's new animosity towards him, though he hadn't thought of his father's cross, and he wished he'd summoned the courage and energy to make things right with his son a long time ago. The two men stood at attention until Jasper broke the silence, his eyes fixed intently on a spot above Carlisle's ear.

"Alice and Bella are flying to Italy. She wanted me to tell you… to prepare you. Edward keeps changing his mind about things, and she's not sure they'll make it in time."

Carlisle stared out the window without asking for details, and Jasper was grateful that someone had gotten to him first. Jasper cringed at the thought of breaking the deafening silence with his exit, but he was about to attempt the maneuver when Carlisle forced him to make eye contact, his face radiating the unsmiling compassion that his work cultivated in him.

"This must be unbearable for you. Our family will never recover completely if Edward is killed, but you stand to lose the core of your existence."

Carlisle's stark honesty steadied Jasper's spinning thoughts so effectively that he responded in kind, forgetting his usual reluctance to trust the older vampire.

"I thought I could bear losing her if she were safe… when she left, I was sure that had already happened. But when she called just now, she told me she still loved me, and after that… I don't think I could live without her, whatever happens."

"Why did you think you'd lost her?"

Carlisle listened as Jasper told him about Mary Alice's gravestone, about his own callous words, about how he'd looked into Alice's eyes and seen her realize that she'd spent the last fifty years with a cold-blooded killer. When he'd finished, his father's compassionate stare bored deeper into his own. Steadily, dispassionately, Carlisle gave his answer.

"You're not a cold-blooded killer, Jasper. I know the difference. You may have killed often in Texas and Mexico, and even in your civilian life, but you don't think about killing the way my father did as he smeared his Bible with the blood of innocent deviants. That kind of thinking is impossible to hide, even from strangers. You are different in some ways from creatures like Alice who have never known deliberate bloodlust, and those differences are also impossible to hide, particularly from a father… or a mate. But by trying to deny her access to what you are, what you were, you leave your union as vulnerable as Edward and Bella left their own. As long as Edward hoped for Bella to love him without loving what he is, without longing for her to be transformed, immersed in his essence, their break was inevitable. I only hope Bella finds him before the mistake becomes a deadly one."

Esme burst in then, shaking with dry sobs as she sought the refuge of Carlisle's arms. Jasper watched them surreptitiously as he left the bedroom, noting the Carlisle's refusal to cut his loving murmurs with any hint of false comfort.

Jasper retreated to his own room and attacked his suitcase as if preparing for a military inspection, hoping to divert his mind from faraway horrors as long as possible, and he was refolding a pair of socks when his hand brushed something that caught the light of the aurora. Jasper disentangled the object and suspended it carefully in front of his face, marveling at the way the diamonds shattered the otherworldly greenish light.

It was days before another phone call broke Jasper's fevered agony and flooded the house with more exuberance than the Cullens had felt in months. Jasper felt oddly insubstantial as his parents and siblings lifted their despondence from his mind, especially as his own anxiety did not quite follow suit. He was passionately grateful that Alice had survived, and wildly nervous about what he had to do when he saw her again. But then he was inhaling icy dampness in Port Angeles's airport terminal, and the arrival gate flooded the room with the scent he craved most desperately.

Alice paused several feet from his sentry-like form, far enough away for her hungry eyes to foreshorten his unwieldy stature. Jasper met her angelic gaze for a long, perfect moment, then strode forward and extended one reverently steady hand. He held her hand in his throughout the beautifully silent drive to Forks, then led her into the forest when they reached the old garage. She followed him into a moonlit clearing, then let him take her coat without a sound of inquiry. He was speechless for a long moment, drinking in the moonlight as it radiated from her sleeveless ecru dress and shimmering bare skin.

"There's something I'd like to give you, something I should have given you a long time ago. I'm not sure you'll want it, when I tell you where it came from, but…"

Jasper's voice trailed off as he held the jeweled rosary up to the moonlight, letting the gold and diamonds pepper Alice's dress with new rainbows. She met his gaze quizzically, but not without understanding.

"It was Maria's?"

"She took it from a girl she killed in Monterrey, the day we finally conquered the wretched place. She liked to move the beads and say the prayer, especially after our territories diminished, like she was worshipping the former height of her own power. I stole it when I left 'cause it never stopped reminding me of the girl who died, of everyone we sacrificed on the altar of our power. I always thought I'd take it back to Monterrey, find another girl to give it to, but I kept making excuses to hold onto it. It's all I have left of that time….It was the worst time of my life, but it'll always be a part of me, and I guess I needed to remember that it gave me a few beautiful things… a few memories that don't make me hate what I am."

Alice took the rosary deliberately and placed it around her neck. Her beauty seemed to redeem the hated object, divesting it of Maria's self-adulation and somehow reclaiming it for its lost owner. As Jasper stared at her, he was flooded with memories of the day when that owner had died and he had fleetingly become one of the most powerful vampires in existence. Clenching his teeth, he resisted the urge to bury the emotions that went with the memories. He took Alice in his arms and compelled her to feel them, pulling her closer as she gasped under the weight of the strange emotions. The starkness of his exposure made Jasper more sensitive to the memories than he'd ever felt before, and at some point they tumbled to the ground. When Jasper remembered climbing a steeple to survey the fallen city, the animalistic triumph made them gasp, arch, and clutch at each other as if orgasm were consuming their fully clothed bodies.

Their eyes met solemnly when the flood of emotions was over, and the passion of the gaze was different from what it had been at the airport. Alice was frightened of what Jasper had shown her, and he was frightened of his new nakedness before her. But when the fearful impulses collided, twisting through a conduit of staring golden eyes, they embraced like lovers and melted into a raw new compassion. Everything was perfect until Alice's features twisted with regret and old fears redoubled in Jasper's mind. Alice brushed his hair out of his eyes, trying to quell the resurfacing worries, then turned her cheek to whisper in his ear.

"I wish I had something, anything like that to give you. But I never even figured out how to see Biloxi clearly. My own parents tried to take back the reality of my time with them, and I guess it's all lost, now that they're gone. Even the old vampire is gone. I'm no closer to knowing who he was, what we meant to each other."

"I'll give you everything I can, Alice. I'm so sorry it can never replace what you lost."

Alice smiled into Jasper's cheek and buried her fingers in his hair as if to protect them from the cold. "Maybe I'm lucky not to remember a life where no one wanted me or loved me. Giving my whole self to you was the easiest thing in the world, because I never belonged to anyone else."

Jasper moaned as Alice shifted her weight deliberately, her passion bubbling up to meet his. He breathed in the familiar grass scent as he rolled on top of her, and they let the sweetness of love and pleasure clear the agony of conquest from their minds. Jasper's new nakedness before Alice set him at peace with his rawest passions, and euphoria transfigured her expression as he gave in to the roughness of his passion without ashamedly withholding eye contact. The rosary broke the moonlight into scattered pastel colors as they thrashed beneath its waning glow, and Jasper realized that Alice had been like the aurora all along. Her mocking spirit was impervious to corruption like his own, because she purified evil things with the shattering irreverence of her laugh.

It was almost morning when Alice pressed his shoulder in a restraining way, peering past their bliss at an image she found neither mysterious nor frightening. With a sigh, she untangled her legs from his and reached for her grass-stained dress.

"Family meeting soon. We'd better hurry home and change before Bella sees us like this and gets red enough to make you attack her again."

They barely had time to don fresh clothes before a delicious burn filled the house and a timid voice called out, "I'd like to talk to everyone at once if that's okay."

Everyone filed into the dining room. Rosalie and Emmett looked nearly as disheveled as Jasper and Alice had been, and even Carlisle and Esme were struggling to moderate their intoxicated glow. But Edward was glaring daggers at his one true love, and Jasper hissed as his brother's venomous eyes turned on Alice. She glared back petulantly, then gave Jasper a little half smile that told him not to worry. Something about the smile also told him that she was waiting for him to do something.

Naturally, Alice knew that they would put Bella's future to a vote, and she hoped she knew how Jasper would weigh in. She fingered the chain of the rosary that lay between her breasts, and she was dazzled all over again by the way Jasper had bared himself so completely, giving her the gift of everything he was, everything her human life had denied her. Alice loved what Jasper was, what she herself was. Bella's eyes brimmed with longing for the gift that Alice had been given, the only gift she'd ever really wanted, and Alice prayed on whatever holiness her heirloom had left that Bella would get what she wanted soon. Alice clenched her fists in anger at the self righteous denial that her misguided little brother was radiating in all directions, but her anger melted when she heard Jasper say that yes, Bella should be free to run like the wind, and hunt, and possess the man she had chosen to love. Alice lifted her beaming face to her transfigured love's eyes, and they silently hoped that Edward would grow up soon.


End file.
